They don’t have to have massive queues- those are artificial to make up for Blizzard not wanting to upgrade their hardware. That every other company in the world can manage this and Blizz can’t makes it clearly a Blizzard issue.
As for what I’d do- I’d have put in balancing from the start. Most of the issue right now stems from imbalance as that’s what most of the players going from one server to another are escaping from.
We don’t even have to do anything outside Vanilla- you have same server only BGs up til Naxx and it makes it a considerable penalty for faction stacking a server.
There’s also the possibility of using free xfers intelligently instead of what Blizz did. Rather that turning balanced servers into imbalanced ones- put the free xfers up for the dominant faction only to servers where they’re smaller. Put soft faction caps on servers rather than total population caps- such as if a server allows 10k players, instead allow 5k Allies, 5k Horde. Which in turn if it does create queues, it’s only for the bigger faction.
You don’t need any hard locks at all, and it makes it so only players that want to go to servers where they have a major numbers advantage have to pay.
Throwing out free xfers and letting them go on long after the target and origin servers have been severely imbalanced is entirely, 100% Blizzard’s doing. So what would I do? Not that, really not a hard fix.
So why did Blizz do that? Because they’re greedy and the thought of that PCT money is worth so much more to them than players being happy with their communities and server balance.
This right here proves youre uneducated on the issue. It’s not about hardware. The world is only designed to support 2.5-3k players. Why do you think there’s so many posts complaining about black lotus. Cramming 20k players onto a classic realm is possible from a harware standpoint, but good luck getting anything done in the world. And remember layering ruined the economy, imagine how the community would react to dynamic spawn rates.
They did that in phase 2. It didn’t work. The dominant faction has no reason to leave. Pvp servers inevitably become imbalanced because people reroll or transfer to avoid pvp. Every pvp server in the history of WoW has ended up 90/10 or worse. That’s why they don’t exist anymore in BFA. In general, players don’t actually want balanced servers, they want to win.
You say they can increase the cap, but then classic is “ruined” by increased server populations. You can’t have it both ways. And pvp servers can’t be balanced. There is just not enough alliance pvp’ers to go around.
I know, which is why I attributed their earlier decisions to just them still not getting it after all these years. But at this point, it’s just soooooo flagrantly bad that I have to believe it’s intentional.
And Blizz is the ones that even gives them that choice in the first place. Blizz can take that choice away. As for what I want Blizz to do about it: layers and free character moves. Their current stance of doing almost nothing is pretty appalling.
Not really though, I can tell you from personal experience. In phase 2 when transfers off of Kromcrush were horde only all 3 friends I started classic with QUIT. They didn’t wait for paid transfers, they didn’t reroll, they just unsubbed. You always have the choice to leave. Doesn’t matter what options blizz gives you.
That’s literally what they did. They had FCM open for a few weeks in the most full realms, along with layering because queues got long. People once again chose the same 2-3 servers. That’s the players fault not blizzards.
Is it McDonald’s fault you’re fat because they sell you unhealthy food? No it’s your own fault if you eat there alot. Nobody held a gun to your head and forced you to transfer to a full server, you made that choice.
Put the blame where it belongs: the carebears rolling on pvp servers because of population. There’s almost all of your imbalances.
This isn’t blizz mismanaging population. This is players stacking servers “cuz dad realms”.
The economy? That’s Susan’s department.
Want Black Lotus. Go camp some nodes and pvp for it.
I am confused as to what the problem is with having faction queues for imbalanced servers…
The OP is 100% right. blizzard creates the imbalance, perpetuates the imbalance, and hard codes imbalance with a heavy horde bias ON PURPOSE to make people pay for a character transfer.
They literally do not care at all if the servers are 99% horde across the board, because all they need to do is code alliance advantages and the neckbeards will all re-roll.
Just look at every man for himself racial ability as an example.
They literally can’t wait to get TBC out so they can rake in the faction change money.
And if people stop playing in disgust RIGHT NOW, they made a bundle on a game that cost them nothing so they win.
Blizzard does not care about world of Warcraft in general, even retail. Mobile apps, micro transactions and simulated gambling are what the company stands for now. That aint gonna change unless laws are passed against these practices in “E” for everybody games.
Bend over and give them your $20 to transfer, or unsub.
Because it’s a dumb idea that causes more problems than it solves. World pvp was dead the second BG’s went live, get over it. Faction balance doesn’t matter when alliance have instant queues, they’re not in the world anyway. Plus when has blizzard ever had a faction queue? What on Earth makes you think they add one to classic. The retail raid scene is almost entirely horde, the retail pvp scene is almost entirely horde, and they have to bribe alliance to turn on warmode. If they haven’t put in the time or energy to fix it in their main game why do you think they do it for classic?
No they don’t. The pvp community chose horde. That’s not blizzards fault. Btw pallies are better than all the horde racials combined, yet they all still went horde. The game is not hard coded with a horde bias. You just have an inferiority complex.
I’d actually argue the opposite. The pvp scene has a massive horde majority. If everyone who wasn’t into pvp went to pve realms every pvp server would be 90/10 horde.
It would be glorious! The pvpers could then congregate on 4 balanced realms. There would probably no queue.
I don’t think it would get to 90/10. That 90/10 is because of carebears listening to streamers and rolling orcs on pvp servers.
“The real Vanilla experience is on pvp servers”.
The only reason Grobb was closed because the community was already getting very vocal. By the time blizzard acted there was already mass transfers and faction imbalance.
There were plenty of other suggestions instead of layering before classics launch and they still went ahead with layering anyway. And yes, this is a business. If you think they havent a plan on how or what is gonna happen to servers months ahead you are delusional.
What you think the incendius fiasko wasn’t calculated? You really believe they did not see the grave imbalance and massive influx on the server and actually needed a few weeks to “come up” with the idea of free transfers?
They literally saw what happened on incendius and probably picked the 2 other most likely candidate servers that could repeat the incendius cycle to get even more money off of their transfer system.
Hell look at netherwind now. It was a half decent server that went to incendius 2.0 in a couple of weeks due to free transfers. It left incendius dead (so ppl gonna transfer from there), Netherwind is the next soon to be dead body thats gonna hit the server graveyard and they practically primed kromkrush to be the next “soon to be ruined” server for the people with too much cash.
This is 100% calculated and youd be naive to think its not. This is a business and they do not respond to situations on a whim after 2 weeks of crisis mode.
I bet they lick their chops on the AQ gate event already, trying to create as many imbalanced servers as possible so everyone else cashes in on another paid transfer wave, because all the dead servers cant open the gates. Id also not be surprised if the transfer restrictions are lifted right before AQ drops.
the would only work assuming there was a relatively even split between alliance and horde pvpers, and there isnt.
to make it work blizzard would have to lock the faction as it gets above a threshold and basically only allow one sided character creations and that will never happen because they cant even get free transfers done smoothly
It would work if there was just a split of carebears from pvp servers. The carebears have everything imbalanced.
Send the carebears to pve servers and watch how fast these problems resolve themselves.
Blizzard doesn’t create server imbalance. Players do. Quit it with conspiracy theory crap what is this ancient aliens? The general playerbase doesn’t want balanced servers, they want to win. Why do you think the biggest servers are also the most imbalanced? Nobody wants to be on a “dead” realm.
Its not a conspiracy. Im also not absolving players from any guilt. They too act too rashly but they understandably look out for themselves and act in a manner that is selfish.
Also I disagree with your statement that servers are imbalanced because players love to dominate one side. Any pvper worth his/her salt who chose a pvp server is afraid of nothing more than being on a gravely imbalanced server. There is nothing worse than running around in the world and meeting nothing but ppl from your own faction. The game is stale then and there is no reason to roll on a pvp server if you can not meet anyone from the enemy faction and engage.
That said, you seem to forget that blizz could have avoided early imbalances by just showing us the data on who rolled what so the palyer base could have adjusted themselves early. Layering led to an unclear picture on what faction had too many people (or to little). To this day we still need to rely on incomplete data like ironforge pro. And if you believe that they are not milking the 25 dollar server transfer system you are naive.
This is exactly why servers are in the state they’re in. Players do what they think is best for themselves, even if it ruins a server and they have to transfer again anyway. Thank god I’m on a server where horde and alliance team up to keep horde guilds from ruining server balance.
Then explain why every pvp server in the history of wow has ended up 90/10 or worse, to the point where they just got rid of them entirely. If the community as a whole actually wanted balanced pvp servers it would happen naturally. It’s not up to blizz to force it to happen when players clearly don’t want it.
That could’ve easily caused even more imbalance as players would avoid servers in which their faction is the minority. Nothing about classic or retail suggests the community actually wants balanced servers. People say they do, but everyone continues to transfer or make characters on imbalanced servers, because there is no downside. The dominant faction has an advantage in nearly every aspect of the game, why would anyone want to give that up?
People that were asking for no layering were doing so because they wanted an authentic vanilla experience. Then Blizzard made these Mega servers with 7-11.5k people which creates problems for the economy and a very different experience than original vanilla size servers.
